A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD natural disaster in the eastern part of Indonesia’s Java island that has remained an unresolved environmental and human tragedy is threatening to weigh on next year’s presidential elections.
The disaster, an incessant mudflow that began near a Lapindo Brantas oil- and gas-drilling site – owned by the powerful Bakrie family – days after an earthquake in 2006, has to date, swallowed 12 villages, submerged toll roads and rice fields, and displaced nearly 40,000 people.